$300 for a 6TB drive doesn't seem very cost-effective when 8TB drives sell for $260, and 4TB drives sell for $140. Heck, even the 4TB HGST DeskStar NAS sells for only $165. This isn't really a fault with the HGST drive specifically (since other 6TB drives aren't any cheaper), but more a fault with the 6TB capacity point.
Of course, the 8TB drive in question is using SMR, and so ought to be rather slow for writes, but when you've got a bunch of them in a server with some SSDs for caching, it shouldn't be so bad.
Here in EU you can get the Seagate Archive 8TB for ~226EUR (275USD with vat). It targets cloud/cold storage market but I think it should be great for a HTPC too... https://geizhals.at/eu/seagate-archive-hdd-v2-8tb-...
Hi there, we are Premium Reseller of HGST, about these disks i could give some more inputs... First, the Seagate is a SMR Disk, only good for Backupszenarios, further they have only 3 years warranty. The HGST 8TB Disk is not a SMR Disk, HGST has got the 10 TB SMR Disk for Backupsolutions. Than the HGST Disk have got 5 Years warranty, for business solutions is that an argument. Last but not least, HGST has released on all SAS3 Disk the Media Caching Technologie, the disk are probably up to 3 times faster than other disk on the market. We have tested disks in our Lab, with a 1.2TB media caching 10k Disk, it will be faster than a 15k normal 2,5 inc disk. For more information, feel free to visit our online Shop: shop.storagespace.ch Kind Regards.
Sorry i have forget that the HGST 8TB also have the Helium 8 Technologie, its also a He8 Plate, the Seagate havent got helium inside... Benefit of HGST Helium: up to 50% less energy cost, and less heat from the plate... If you wanna have an offer or more informations: [email protected]
Having a higher performance 6TB drive now is worth the extra money in the time saved over upgrading a 4TB drive later. It may be twice the price, but in $ it's not really much compared to reworking an entire setup later to add storage (unless you have a 8+ disk array with lots of room to grow)
There is no 6 TB WD Red Pro. In addition, this is meant for tower form-factor NAS units (that is why the name 'Deskstar'). The warranty and MTBF / URE ratings are closer to the WD Red than the WD Red Pro. For the rackmount units (which the WD Red Pro targets), HGST suggests the Ultrastar lineup.
initial large capacity drives are generally slow, especially in the case of a next-gen platter density increase, because the technology is not refined enough for higher spindle speeds. the sole exception are HGST's 8TB Helium drives, which are theoretically capable of 12TB capacities, but since its new technology, they want to play it conservatively and see how the 8TB reliability pans out.
The WD Red Pro and the HGST Deskstar NAS have the same RPM, at 4TB the same cache size, also the same MTBF and the same Load/Unload cycles. Their data sheets describe similar operations: HGST - 1-5 bays, WD - 1-16 bays. The real difference is the warranty and URE. Yes, WD markets the Red Pro for rackmount use, but you'll see that WD doesn't use this drive in their own rackmount system or in their Arkeia rackmount systems - they use RE and SE drives for that purpose. Based on this spec data, I view it important to include the WD Red Pro in this comparison. http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/EN... http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/0BF8...$file/DS_NAS_spec.pdf
'rackmount' target vs 'tower form factor' : This has got more to do with the firmware aspects related to vibration tolerance. Rackmount system drives are engineered for more tolerance during extended use. It is more a reliability aspect.
We chose a rackmount to keep things consistent across multiple drives. Our 'extended' tests only consists of running 24x7 for about a week (and only with three drives in the rack unit) - vibration tolerance doesn't affect our testbed setup much.
We are reviewing the 6 TB version here. If WD were to put out a 6 TB WD Red Pro, we would use that as a comparison point. As it stands, comparing a 4 TB drive and a 6 TB drive is like comparing apples and oranges.
This is the reason why they have different products targeting the same market segment.. one from WD and one from HGST (for example, WD Red and HGST Deskstar NAS). So, this is NOT REALLY A WD drive, as you claim.
We have been covering HGST for quite some time (the WD acquisition was made in early 2012) : http://anandtech.com/tag/hgst : The way the products have been introduced in each of the reviews has not changed since then, as you can see for yourself.
You, sir, are a troll. If you are so cynical about Purch acquiring AnandTech, go somewhere else. Anyone who has been following hard drives for the last two years knows HGST is owned by WD, but that they are separate entities. There is no need for anyone to point out the obvious.
How does "renowned brands" translate into "ownership"? They could be simply doing advertising work on OCN. When I checked out that Purch webpage you mentioned, all I saw was a network of websites for their advertising "partners" listed as renowned brands. Not a single indication of ownership is existent.
Great. Now every article comments section will be descending into a "anandtech is a horrible site now that they were bought by Purch." If this is such a horrible thing, just leave. Let those of us who still enjoy Anandtech be a part of the community, and make our own decisions if the quality changes over the next couple of years.
I don't look to the comments section of an article to see the bickering of the business policies of the site. I want to see comments about the product being reviewed or the news being reported.
HGST is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, not Toshiba. While HGST did divest some assets to Toshiba relating to 3.5" drives, the company itself went to Western Digital, and never stopped making 3.5" drives.
The expensive component would be buying HDDs. E.g., for the latest requirement I should go for at least 12 HDDs (RAID 6, so I get 10). Now, each HDD will cost not less than $400 for sure.
You can building you own custom NAS Server once you get a solid case with many HDD drive mounts. E.g., Cooler Master got Stacker 935. One can easily stuff 16 HDDs (RAID 6 max. limit) in that case by buying additional caddies. Not expensive at all.
Mobo? Go only for Server-grade model like Asrock C226M WS micro ATX board + DDR3 16GB 1600 MHz ECC (unbuffered) RAM.
CPU? For that HDD volume, I can go for Core i3-4360T or Xeon E3 V3 processor. Both support ECC RAM.
I like to see the NAS performances in RAID-5, they are just lulz!
When will NAS performance be checked with 10Gb Ethernet link?!? 100MB/s or 120MB/s is what I expect from a single 2.5inch USB3 drive, not on a NAS that cost many grands!
Maybe it would be interesting to benchmark them on a Promise Pegasus2 R4, where you could obtain 5X to 6X more performances on the same hard drive through thunderbolt, to show their real potential???
It just depends on the model of NAS they use for review. Synology, QNAP, etc all have models w/ 10Gig-E or slots for 10gig nics. Some have dual slots.
The Promise R4 is a different class of product. And Thunderbolt is irrelevant. All of these tests could've been done on a single SATA3 interconnect. 6Gbps is well-more than a single one of these drives will make use of (or, if we're talking external, the 5Gbps of USB3).
The whole point of a NAS is simultaneous multi-client access. A Thunderbolt peripheral or a 2.5" USB 3 drive is not geared for that purpose.
Home and power users run NAS units with two GbE ports link-aggregated.
As mentioned in the review, the main difference between the drives start to appear in the form of differing average response times as the number of clients increase. Please check the multi-client CIFS access section.
10 GbE is yet to go mainstream outside of SME environments. But, rest assured, we are looking at 10 GbE for our SSDs in NAS units evaluation.
I purchased two of these and put them in a Dell server as RAID drives. It was curious to read about the Qnap IO error as the drives failed to operate correctly in the server to start with - when on SATA channel 2/3 they always got an IO error during the boot which caused Windows Storage Spaces to reject the drives. On moving to channel 0/1 they show no I/O error at boot and work fine.
Once working, they appear ok if not a little noisy. Run 4 degrees warmer than the boot drive too.
Only time will tell how they work out, but it's a lot of fast space which is what I was after - just look a lot of pain to get working due to the IO error causing the drive rejection.
Some advice please folks.. I have 2x8 bay synology drives ( 1815+) which i use for SOHO file backup and some media on a very small network of 3 users. At the moment i have 5 3TB WD reds in each and i want to add another 3 drives to each.
My question is what are the best drives to add to the array? Reliability is more an issue than cost.
I was at first thinking about WD red Pro, but i am worried that the higher speed than my existing reds would cause a problem...Will it?
The other alternative would be to make one unit all the new deckstars with the higher speed, and then use the old WD reds to increase the other unit.
Great review from a great site. Nice Products Spec tables, very usefull and easy to understand. Guspaz: I think little and fast SDD drives are much better than big and slow, by the way, who can fill up 8TB ? I have never ever got more than 1TB. Even with a lot of movies and photos.. I found i nice site witth great reviews: http://hddex.blogspot.com/
@However, the HGST Deskstar NAS drives have a 7200 RPM rating and the 5 / 6 TB variants come with 128 MB of DRAM cache. This is expected to make them perform closer to the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 and Enterprise NAS HDD drives.
Ganesh, that's a wrong comparison. Deskstar HDDs are targeted at Consumer or SOHO or even SMB segment. Why? Because it gets quite easy to go for RAID by adding a few HDDs in the Cases. Rest is all known.
If folks (like me) looking for Enterprise-grade drives, go for Hitachi's SAS 12 GB/s HDDs to get very high performance and ultra reliability. One can even choose SATA III HDD drives too. Most important is to know when to use those models. E.g.,
a) Hitachi Ultrastar 7K6000 SAS 12Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD b) Hitachi Ultrastar 7K6000 SATA 6Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD c) Hitachi Deskstar NAS SATA 6Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD
Those three drives may look more or less same, but they aren't!
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Guspaz - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
$300 for a 6TB drive doesn't seem very cost-effective when 8TB drives sell for $260, and 4TB drives sell for $140. Heck, even the 4TB HGST DeskStar NAS sells for only $165. This isn't really a fault with the HGST drive specifically (since other 6TB drives aren't any cheaper), but more a fault with the 6TB capacity point.Of course, the 8TB drive in question is using SMR, and so ought to be rather slow for writes, but when you've got a bunch of them in a server with some SSDs for caching, it shouldn't be so bad.
insz - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Can you please provide a link to an 8TB drive for $260?Dreamwalker - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Here in EU you can get the Seagate Archive 8TB for ~226EUR (275USD with vat). It targets cloud/cold storage market but I think it should be great for a HTPC too...https://geizhals.at/eu/seagate-archive-hdd-v2-8tb-...
patrioteagle07 - Tuesday, January 6, 2015 - link
You do not want that drive... it is cheap because it is SMR. SMR is for COLD storage not NAS.BeAi - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Hi there, we are Premium Reseller of HGST, about these disks i could give some more inputs... First, the Seagate is a SMR Disk, only good for Backupszenarios, further they have only 3 years warranty.The HGST 8TB Disk is not a SMR Disk, HGST has got the 10 TB SMR Disk for Backupsolutions. Than the HGST Disk have got 5 Years warranty, for business solutions is that an argument. Last but not least, HGST has released on all SAS3 Disk the Media Caching Technologie, the disk are probably up to 3 times faster than other disk on the market. We have tested disks in our Lab, with a 1.2TB media caching 10k Disk, it will be faster than a 15k normal 2,5 inc disk. For more information, feel free to visit our online Shop: shop.storagespace.ch Kind Regards.
BeAi - Wednesday, January 7, 2015 - link
Sorry i have forget that the HGST 8TB also have the Helium 8 Technologie, its also a He8 Plate, the Seagate havent got helium inside...Benefit of HGST Helium: up to 50% less energy cost, and less heat from the plate... If you wanna have an offer or more informations: [email protected]
takeshi7 - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
I think he's citing this article. That $260/8TB is bulk pricing for buying 20 drives it looks like.http://www.extremetech.com/computing/195543-seagat...
nandnandnand - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
The $260 8 TB drive isn't out yet. But it is a good thingrealwarder - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
Having a higher performance 6TB drive now is worth the extra money in the time saved over upgrading a 4TB drive later. It may be twice the price, but in $ it's not really much compared to reworking an entire setup later to add storage (unless you have a 8+ disk array with lots of room to grow)hlmcompany - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Regardless of the capacity, this HGST drive is in the same category as a WD Red Pro, NOT a WD Red.ganeshts - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
There is no 6 TB WD Red Pro. In addition, this is meant for tower form-factor NAS units (that is why the name 'Deskstar'). The warranty and MTBF / URE ratings are closer to the WD Red than the WD Red Pro. For the rackmount units (which the WD Red Pro targets), HGST suggests the Ultrastar lineup.Samus - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
initial large capacity drives are generally slow, especially in the case of a next-gen platter density increase, because the technology is not refined enough for higher spindle speeds. the sole exception are HGST's 8TB Helium drives, which are theoretically capable of 12TB capacities, but since its new technology, they want to play it conservatively and see how the 8TB reliability pans out.hlmcompany - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
The WD Red Pro and the HGST Deskstar NAS have the same RPM, at 4TB the same cache size, also the same MTBF and the same Load/Unload cycles. Their data sheets describe similar operations: HGST - 1-5 bays, WD - 1-16 bays. The real difference is the warranty and URE. Yes, WD markets the Red Pro for rackmount use, but you'll see that WD doesn't use this drive in their own rackmount system or in their Arkeia rackmount systems - they use RE and SE drives for that purpose. Based on this spec data, I view it important to include the WD Red Pro in this comparison.http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/EN...
http://www.hgst.com/tech/techlib.nsf/techdocs/0BF8...$file/DS_NAS_spec.pdf
hlmcompany - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
Also, if the HGST Deskstar NAS is not designed for a rackmount system, why would you test it one? Simply put, because there is no difference.ganeshts - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
'rackmount' target vs 'tower form factor' : This has got more to do with the firmware aspects related to vibration tolerance. Rackmount system drives are engineered for more tolerance during extended use. It is more a reliability aspect.We chose a rackmount to keep things consistent across multiple drives. Our 'extended' tests only consists of running 24x7 for about a week (and only with three drives in the rack unit) - vibration tolerance doesn't affect our testbed setup much.
We are reviewing the 6 TB version here. If WD were to put out a 6 TB WD Red Pro, we would use that as a comparison point. As it stands, comparing a 4 TB drive and a 6 TB drive is like comparing apples and oranges.
Wwhat - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
So HGST is what was hitachi and is now owned by western digital, so it's a WD drive really. Got it.You might have introduced it like that, but let's purch that thought and continue.
ganeshts - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
Despite WD's purchase of HGST, the manufacturing facilities and product lines are still separate because China is yet to sanction the purchase fully:http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/10/wd_mofcom_...
This is the reason why they have different products targeting the same market segment.. one from WD and one from HGST (for example, WD Red and HGST Deskstar NAS). So, this is NOT REALLY A WD drive, as you claim.
We have been covering HGST for quite some time (the WD acquisition was made in early 2012) : http://anandtech.com/tag/hgst : The way the products have been introduced in each of the reviews has not changed since then, as you can see for yourself.
jardows2 - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
You, sir, are a troll. If you are so cynical about Purch acquiring AnandTech, go somewhere else. Anyone who has been following hard drives for the last two years knows HGST is owned by WD, but that they are separate entities. There is no need for anyone to point out the obvious.chrnochime - Tuesday, December 23, 2014 - link
And we all know how brilliant TH is these days....Go read this and be enlightened by how great Purch is:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1530926/anandtech-anand...
start from post #34, and read down. See how they put OCN as "renowned brands" even when they don't own OCN.
Doh! - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
How does "renowned brands" translate into "ownership"? They could be simply doing advertising work on OCN. When I checked out that Purch webpage you mentioned, all I saw was a network of websites for their advertising "partners" listed as renowned brands. Not a single indication of ownership is existent.MamiyaOtaru - Tuesday, December 30, 2014 - link
it's mostly the "our" that immediately precedes it. Seems like it could be interpreted a couple ways. seems like it's a molehill though hehjardows2 - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
Great. Now every article comments section will be descending into a "anandtech is a horrible site now that they were bought by Purch." If this is such a horrible thing, just leave. Let those of us who still enjoy Anandtech be a part of the community, and make our own decisions if the quality changes over the next couple of years.I don't look to the comments section of an article to see the bickering of the business policies of the site. I want to see comments about the product being reviewed or the news being reported.
edzieba - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
Nope. Western Digital acquired Hitachi's 2.5" drive division. Toshiba acquired Hitachi's 3.5" drive division.Guspaz - Thursday, December 25, 2014 - link
HGST is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital, not Toshiba. While HGST did divest some assets to Toshiba relating to 3.5" drives, the company itself went to Western Digital, and never stopped making 3.5" drives.Nocturnal - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
I do have a question, how much does that server run if someone was to purchase it put together like that?akula2 - Saturday, January 3, 2015 - link
The expensive component would be buying HDDs. E.g., for the latest requirement I should go for at least 12 HDDs (RAID 6, so I get 10). Now, each HDD will cost not less than $400 for sure.You can building you own custom NAS Server once you get a solid case with many HDD drive mounts. E.g., Cooler Master got Stacker 935. One can easily stuff 16 HDDs (RAID 6 max. limit) in that case by buying additional caddies. Not expensive at all.
Mobo? Go only for Server-grade model like Asrock C226M WS micro ATX board + DDR3 16GB 1600 MHz ECC (unbuffered) RAM.
CPU? For that HDD volume, I can go for Core i3-4360T or Xeon E3 V3 processor. Both support ECC RAM.
akula2 - Saturday, January 3, 2015 - link
I forgot to add -- you'll need to buy a PCIe RAID card too.It will cost $300 for a good model, say a LSI 12Gb/s MegaRAID SATA+SAS RAID controller card.
Note that 4360T has low TDP of 35W only.
iAPX - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
I like to see the NAS performances in RAID-5, they are just lulz!When will NAS performance be checked with 10Gb Ethernet link?!?
100MB/s or 120MB/s is what I expect from a single 2.5inch USB3 drive, not on a NAS that cost many grands!
Maybe it would be interesting to benchmark them on a Promise Pegasus2 R4, where you could obtain 5X to 6X more performances on the same hard drive through thunderbolt, to show their real potential???
Integr8d - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
It just depends on the model of NAS they use for review. Synology, QNAP, etc all have models w/ 10Gig-E or slots for 10gig nics. Some have dual slots.The Promise R4 is a different class of product. And Thunderbolt is irrelevant. All of these tests could've been done on a single SATA3 interconnect. 6Gbps is well-more than a single one of these drives will make use of (or, if we're talking external, the 5Gbps of USB3).
ganeshts - Wednesday, December 24, 2014 - link
The whole point of a NAS is simultaneous multi-client access. A Thunderbolt peripheral or a 2.5" USB 3 drive is not geared for that purpose.Home and power users run NAS units with two GbE ports link-aggregated.
As mentioned in the review, the main difference between the drives start to appear in the form of differing average response times as the number of clients increase. Please check the multi-client CIFS access section.
10 GbE is yet to go mainstream outside of SME environments. But, rest assured, we are looking at 10 GbE for our SSDs in NAS units evaluation.
Laststop311 - Thursday, December 25, 2014 - link
Price/reliability/performance I think this is the best series of drives to purchase.akula2 - Saturday, January 3, 2015 - link
You're absolutely correct. I own many Hitachi drives compared to WD and Seagate models.realwarder - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
I purchased two of these and put them in a Dell server as RAID drives. It was curious to read about the Qnap IO error as the drives failed to operate correctly in the server to start with - when on SATA channel 2/3 they always got an IO error during the boot which caused Windows Storage Spaces to reject the drives. On moving to channel 0/1 they show no I/O error at boot and work fine.Once working, they appear ok if not a little noisy. Run 4 degrees warmer than the boot drive too.
Only time will tell how they work out, but it's a lot of fast space which is what I was after - just look a lot of pain to get working due to the IO error causing the drive rejection.
StevieBee - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
Some advice please folks.. I have 2x8 bay synology drives ( 1815+) which i use for SOHO file backup and some media on a very small network of 3 users. At the moment i have 5 3TB WD reds in each and i want to add another 3 drives to each.My question is what are the best drives to add to the array? Reliability is more an issue than cost.
I was at first thinking about WD red Pro, but i am worried that the higher speed than my existing reds would cause a problem...Will it?
The other alternative would be to make one unit all the new deckstars with the higher speed, and then use the old WD reds to increase the other unit.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Merry Christmas
Steve
intiims - Friday, December 26, 2014 - link
Great review from a great site. Nice Products Spec tables, very usefull and easy to understand.Guspaz: I think little and fast SDD drives are much better than big and slow, by the way, who can fill up 8TB ? I have never ever got more than 1TB. Even with a lot of movies and photos..
I found i nice site witth great reviews:
http://hddex.blogspot.com/
akula2 - Saturday, January 3, 2015 - link
@However, the HGST Deskstar NAS drives have a 7200 RPM rating and the 5 / 6 TB variants come with 128 MB of DRAM cache. This is expected to make them perform closer to the Seagate Enterprise Capacity v4 and Enterprise NAS HDD drives.Ganesh, that's a wrong comparison. Deskstar HDDs are targeted at Consumer or SOHO or even SMB segment. Why? Because it gets quite easy to go for RAID by adding a few HDDs in the Cases. Rest is all known.
If folks (like me) looking for Enterprise-grade drives, go for Hitachi's SAS 12 GB/s HDDs to get very high performance and ultra reliability. One can even choose SATA III HDD drives too. Most important is to know when to use those models. E.g.,
a) Hitachi Ultrastar 7K6000 SAS 12Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD
b) Hitachi Ultrastar 7K6000 SATA 6Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD
c) Hitachi Deskstar NAS SATA 6Gb/s - 6 TB, 7200, 128 MB HDD
Those three drives may look more or less same, but they aren't!